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Airport Group Embarks on Digital Journey with Agency Appointment

The Manchester Airports Group (MAG), the country's largest UK owned airport operator, has appointed digital agency Code Computerlove, as it embarks on a journey of reinventing its digital experiences, beginning with a programme of performance optimisation.

Four UK airports come under the MAG umbrella – Stanstead, East Midlands, Bournemouth and Manchester (which is the busiest airport outside the London region) – that combined serve around 42 million passengers every year.

Its partnership with Code will begin with a programme of performance optimisation for each of the Airport websites, where the agency will work in rapid cycles to develop and publish new user features and customer experiences focusing on the most visited and commercially important sections of the site.

Using its Design Sprint process, Code will identify opportunities that will be further explored with user experience methodologies and iterations on the live sites as insights are gained with real users. Work will also be done laying the foundations for further development with regards to the group’s technical infrastructure.

Nolan Hough, EVP Ecommerce, at MAG, said ‘’We commissioned Code to help drive more commercial value from our main traffic driving landing pages, looking at how users behave in order to fuel new ideas, without redeveloping the underlying software or adding complexity.

‘’We’ve very much bought into Code’s approach. Rather than spend months in development, Code’s philosophy to digital development means that we can have live prototypes in the hands of real users collecting real data rapidly – which for us is great. We learn fast whilst limiting our exposure to commercial risk.’’

Nolan added: “There is a longer term vision that we’re working to that will see us applying more sophisticated digital technologies and techniques to achieve our overall commercial ambitions, focused on a better understanding of our customer and using data in a more effective way.

“Our vision is to be come the world’s most customer-centric and stress free travel experience by focusing on Mobile First, intuitive and personalised digital airport experiences.”

Code Computerlove client services director Rob Jones said: “This is a hugely exciting project for us to be working on, with a client-side team that has huge ambitions in terms of developing their digital capabilities.

“While delivering immediate value to the current sites, the long term goal is to make MAG an innovator in its field and world-class customer service provider.”

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